Recent posts by LordBucket on Kongregate

Highest kill is P.Baal 9. Game was starting to get slow though, so I’ve gone back to farming GP on Chronos for a while. I’ve gone from ~50 to 86 rebirths and ~40 billion to 65 billion stat multi in the past week. Maybe another week farming GP, then focus on multi for a while and we’ll see how I feel before I go back to climbing through gods again.

We have considered bringing Catherine into future games but I literally have such an intense writers block

Well, if you’re going to make her your mascot, then it might make sense to approach it from the angle of making games to flesh out her and her background rather than making games and finding ways to justify her appearing in them.

For example, if you wanted to have a tower defense game you could have it be her as a young girl assembling walls of blocks and things which are assaulted by little toy army men and dolls, and every round could be a race against the clock, and when the time runs out her parents come into the room and scold her for not being asleep like a good princess. So she has to thwart the toy and doll army before that. The idea being that it’s her as a child playing out her ambitions that are eventually realized in this game.

A lot of premises immediately follow from that line of thinking. You could have her sitting in very boring etiquette class, daydreaming. The game itself that the player plays is the daydream, but level starts and ending are punctuated by the etiquette instructor telling her to sit up straight and not not drool so much. Which infuriates her because she was not drooling, how dare he suggest such a thing! Then back to daydreaming, begin the next level of the game. Etc.

You could have a puzzle/platformer where the premise is that the royal chefs have been instructed by her parents that she is to eat her brussel sprouts, but she wants cookies. So she’s trying to get to the cookies while they chase her down with the brussel sprouts. To win, she has to not only get to the cookies, she has to also manipulate blocks and mobs so that the chefs chasing her get stuck with the sprouts. Each level could feature a different, vile vegetable, because everyone knows that cookies make young priincesses grow healthy and strong.

What sort of game did you want to make next? I think personally I’d like to see an RPG or a datesim/graphic novel, but I think those have to come later after you have a couple more games under your belt, and after you’ve built up more lore surrounding her character.

I think this is probably the right decision. Idle Conquest was obviously originally intended to be a cute little one-shot that people play for a couple days and move on. And it filled that niche well. The surprise came when Catherine turned out to be very lovable. She kept a lot of us coming back for an, to be honest, respectable “first game” but nevertheless very mediocre actual game in terms of long term playability.

So many of us kept playing. Taking it more seriously than the mechanics really justified. And you tried to accommodate us. Hey, you were excited! Look at such terrific response from players, yay! But Idle Conquest was kind of like a go-kart. Sure, it’s fun for a while, but you can’t just staple a bigger engine on the back and expect to take it on a cross-country trip. It’s still just a go-kart.

This last update…well, lots of things could be said about it. I’m sure you invested a lot of time and energy into it. But….yeah, I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t been very well received. For new players, it will be a nice extra touch. Again, we love Catherine. There’s now more of her to love. For veteran players, it didn’t really add much. Those who just wanted to see bigger numbers didn’t get their bigger numbers. They got a nerf. And even those of us who were never very thrilled by the game itself but loved Catherine, well…even so, this update kind of falls a bit short of expectations. It’s just a lot of text, really. Now, if you’d turned it into a Japanese style datesim or something, or an actual graphical novel, sure…that might have been fun. But if you were going to do that, that should really be an entirely new game, not merely a new “engine” stapled onto the back of the go-kart.

So, yes…I think your’e done. And probably a lot of us players are done. And that’s ok. We all had a much better run than expected. I’d rather we let this die with dignity than drag it out until everyone is burned out and unhappy.

And as for Catherine Von Conquerer, I’m sure we’ll be seeing her again.

To be fair, this particular problem was predicted. We all knew it was coming. It’s why Yostuba was pointing out the conquest balance problem way back in December and why I was proposing a DK wipe a month ago. I see why he didn’t want to do that, and it probably would have made a lot of people angry…but the option is there if you choose it for yourself.

There are 24 avatar image options. There are 28 creations unlocked by defeating gods. Add 4 more image options, and associate one with every creation. Once any creation has been built once, unlock it permanently, including after rebirths. Keep the current ability to spend GP to unlock them. And since once unlocked, image options remain unlocked whether from purchase or building a creation, have the avatar “remember” what it’s set to after each rebirth.

Even as someone who has killed PBaal 8, I rarely bother building any creation after Weather, because they’re not needed for monuments and the unlocks don’t persist. I doubt any player in the game is regularly making anything higher than suns. Somebody who builds the higher end creations, some of which take weeks, really deserves to get something for it

Also, a solar system really should require only one sun, since that’s what a solar system is: a star and the objects that orbit it.

No rebirths ever at all? That’s an interesting choice. How many days played and which god are you up to?

Also…why? Even as close as I am to 1 cloning everything, I’d say it’s not really that huge of a thing. From where I am it will take ~34 more days to finish for a physical.mystics gain rate of only 3.2 times as much. It would be vastly more time efficient to simply farm GP for enough additional clones to train those skills at the higher cost.

1) Should i keep speed run or follow on? and if continue, what amount i need to achieve in the above stat?

Chronos is good place for speedruns, but your stats are already higher than they really need to be. You’ve obviously been farming for a while. If you want to continue farming, you’re at the right place to be doing it. But there isn’t really any particular target beyond where you are that you “need to get to” before you move on. You’re long past that point. You could move on at any time and it wouldn’t hurt you. But, if you want to farm more, now’s the time. Once you start progressing into P. Baals, GP gain slows way down and if you want more later it’s kind of a nuisance to go back to farming.

You might consider farming for a hundred or two GP to keep in reserve and then moving on. Being able to move a slider to casually double or triple your healing rate or damage is very convenient, and that convenience far outweighs the diminishing returns you’d probably from spending those points at this stage. Though I notice you didn’t include your clone cap with your stats. You might check the math in the GP guide confirm that your clone cap is in a good place relative to your build speed.

2) When i speed run, should i build divinity generator and use it?

The standard answer is yes. My answer is “it depends.” There’s a sweet spot for farming that benefits from building a generator, and there’s a sweet spot for farming that doesn’t benefit from a generator. I’m going to guess building the generator will be better in your case, but that’s not always the case. Try it both ways and see which gives better results for your stats. Remember that you can turn auto fight off and fight gods for instant divinity. There are cases where it’s a lot faster to simply do that a couple times rather than build a generator, level a generator, the wait for creation to be reconverted back into divnity.

Either way though, once you stop speedrunning and resume progression the divinity generator will become essential.

After 51 weeks of getting every single kongpanion shiny every single time…kongpanion #52, “Frets” is now my first kongpanion I will fail to get a shiny hat for. Was busy playing Eve, and missed midnight. Sadly, I already had the Tuesday badge and if I’d simply logged on and clicked it that day I’d have a shiny Frets. Curious to see if there’s only one year’s worth and starting next week it will start over with kongpanions I already have.

But, 51 shinies in a row, starting from the week kongpanions were introduced.

I’ve often felt like achievement multipliers are smaller than they should be. The mouseovers claim that achievements multiply relevant effects by hundreds, yet they barely seem noticeable. So after spending almost a week pouring gold into cathedrals, I took before and after screenshots of reaching the 900 achievement:

It appears that achievement "multipliers"a re not actually “multiplied.” They’re added to the DK multiplier.

12463+280 = 12743
12463+675 = 13138

In this case, that means that spending a week to get that last cathedral achievement was worth approximately 288 seconds of sitting around simply letting my DKs accumulate.

Obviously this is a balance issue. But unfortunately it’ multiple balance issues. The problem isn’t only that achievements are too weak, it’s also that others are too strong

I therefore propose a simultaneous buff and nerf: decrease the effect of both these multipliers to a simple “1 per unit” and make them stack multiplicatively with each other.

So, with zero achievements and zero conquests, you would start with a base multiplier of 1+0+0 = 1×. No effect. Once you reach the 100 buildings achievement for any specific building, you would receive a plus 1 multiplier from the achievement. 1+1+0 = 2×. Double effect. If you then conquer the world, you gain a plus 1 conquest multi. 1+1+1 = 3×. If you then reach 200 buildings for a specific building, it becomes 1+2+1 = 4×. The conquest multi would basically be applied as a direct multiplier to each and every building achievement.

This both reigns in the out of control conquest multipliers as well as make achievements multipliers matter. In the above images I’ve conquered the world 12 times. The net effects of completing that last cathedral achievement was to go from 1.03 to 1.06 billion gold per second. Less than 3% increase.

With the proposed system, instead of a 60x multiplier to my rate of DK gain…and basically nothing from gaining the achievements because DKs make them irrelevant, I would instead have had a 12x multiplier from conquest, plus a a 8x multiplier from the 800 building achieve would which increase to a 9x multiplier at tt 900 building mark. Since these would be multiplicative, this would result in a change from 12*8=96x to 12*9=106×.

This does vastly reduce the value of the conquest multiplier. But I think we all know that it’s too powerful. Not only does it trivialize everything else, it trivializes all possible future content. Yotsuba: consider that. I personally have a 60x conquest multiplier, and after my next reset roughly 300 million dark knights. There are plenty of people with more, as and you’ve pointed out, once you have a couple conquests the game rapidly spirals out of control. In an “endless” incremental game, that’s not as much of a problem. You can simply keep adding zeros. Here, with a finite map…that doesn’t really work.

I realize it won’t be a popular suggestion, but I would personally support a DK wipe…if it came with significant new content. New content that from what I gather is already being designed anyway. As is, for me and most of the rest of us past the “I can comfortably conquer the world in under an hour” phase of the game, there isn’t really anything left to do. Simply changing the ratios and math isn’t going to change that. Most of the people who stand to lose their hundreds of millions of DKs…you’re going to lose them sooner or later anyway because there’s nothing left for us to do. And it won’t be fun for anyone if “weeks” worth of new content is burned through in 20 minutes by all of us who’ve accumulated weeks worth of conquest multis and hunderds of millions of dark knights. There’s no way to balance that with people just starting out.

So, I propose, rework the multipliers a above, removing the DK multiplier effect of conquest completely in the process. Make it stack multiplicatively with achievements bonuses instead. Then, turn dark knights into some sort of currency system that can be used to be persistent upgrades. Either work it into your “building in conquered regions” system currently in process, or go play Clicker Heroes for a few weeks and steal ideas from that.

So, assuming a 1000 “base” value, 300 GP on on stat would increase it to 4000. Spending 25 of those GP would decrease it to 3750, which is a 6.25% decrease. Assuming I spent those 25 GP on clones building the corresponding monument, going from 149999 to 159999 would provide only a 6.67% increase.

More, but not by very much. If it were 275 instead of 300 GP on that stat, spending from 275 down to 250 would be a 9.1% decrease, definitely more than I’d gain from the extra 10,000 clones.

So the “balance point” where it makes sense to spend GP on clones is relatively high, and I just happen to be near that balance point at ~300 GP and 149999 clones.

Also more monuments mean a higher statistic multiplier which is kinda important for p baal versions.

Well, in my case my current stat multi is 4.3 billion, and I’ve only killed up to P. Baal V2. Back around Chronos my stat multi was lagging behind at about a quarter my god multi, but now I can’t keep up with it, and the time between new god kills seems to be getting longer.

Has anyone done the math on the relative value of spending GP on increased shadow clone cap vs simply keeping them for stat bonuses?

For example, I currently have a clone cap of 149999, and almost 300 GP in reserve. 300 GP in battle, for example, gives me a 300% bonus to that stat. If I were to spend all 300 on increasing my clone cap, that would mean trading that 300% bonus for an increase of shadow clones from 149999 to 269999. Effectively an 80% increase to my monument build speed.

I’m unconvinced that 80% faster building is better than a 300% increase to any stat I want to increase.

And even if we break that down to individual purchases, it doesn’t look any better. 25 GP is worth a 25% stat boost, but going from 149999 to 159999 clones is only a ~7% increase. How is 7% faster building better than a straight 25% stat bonus? Especially given that even with the extra clones I still need to fund those monuments with divinity and more build speed does not directly correspond to more monuments at a one to one ratio due to to that fact each additional monument level takes longer to build than the previous. In the time it takes to build 100 of any monument, if I spent that exact same amount of time building with 7% more clones, I would not end up with 107 monuments. Whereas a 25% GP bonus to a stat is a full 25% bonus to that stat, instantly, immediately, and with no divinity investment.

Is there something obvious I’m missing here, or is spending GP on clones just not that great of a deal?

Catherine had always been a kind, sweet and loving child who loved to cuddle puppies and share her cookies with the kitchen staff. But she was also very lonely. All the neighbor kids were scared of her because she was the princess. One day, while strolling through the market under guard, she saw a starving peasant child huddled under a market stall. Catherine’s heart reached out to the poor child, and in an act of great tenderness and sacrifice, she pulled her favorite plush pony from inside the pouch in her dress and gave it to the poor child.

Unfortunately, the child had been taught that pretty princesses are part of the 1%, and therefore all evil and horrible, awful people. So the child bit the head off the plushie and threw it back into Catherine’s face.

It wasn’t the first time the good, sweet Catherine had been rejected by those she only wanted to befriend and love, but it was the last. For from that day, Catherine started playing with a new friend.

The General.

The king and queen were a little worried, at first, when Catherine began speaking of the dashing General in her room, her great friend who always listened and would never reject her. But the castle guards swore that no one besides Catherine herself had passed in or out of her chambers. One day, the queen walked past Catherine’s door and heard her talking to someone. Concerned, she stepped inside to see Catherine playing alone with her army figurines.

“But, General,” she protested. “Shouldn’t we subjugate the hinterlands first? They make really good lollipops there and it would be good for…oh, hello mommy!”

“Where is your friend, the General?” the queen inquired.

“Right there!” she pointed proudly at the empty seat next to hers. “He’s in charge of cavalry for the campaign!”

“I see.” the queen sighed. ‘Well, it could be worse,’ she thought to herself.

In general, Morgulis is a bad deal unless you’re very late game. Basically every hero soul you move over to him gives you 11% instead of 10%. That sounds ok when you’re only spending a couple hero to buy him, but the problem is the opportunity cost for buying more ancients. Buying him when he’s “cheap” doesn’t actually make him any cheaper than if you buy him when he’s expensive. It only seems like it does.

For example, let’s say you have 100 hero souls, you want to buy 5 ancients, and you’re considering buying Morg too. Once you do, you’ll move over all your remaining hero souls to him so they each give more damage.

So, to make it cheap, you buy Morg first. This is an immediate gain. You spent 1 hero souls worth 10% dps to get an 11% bonus from Morg. At this point, you could spend any number of hero souls leveling him and it would improve your dps.

But you still want the other five ancients, so you buy them. Looking at the above chart, buying 6 ancients total would cost 1+2+4+8+16+35 = 66 hero souls. That leaves 34, which you use to level Morg. He’s now level 35, times 11 means a net 385% dps boost that he gives you.

But, what if you hadn’t bought him at all? That would mean buying only 5 ancients instead of six. 1+2+4+8+16 = 31 hero souls spent, leaving 69, which is worth a 690% damage bonus.

You do much better not buying Morgulis becuse again, the “real” cost to buy him is always the cost of the last ancient you buy, not the cost you pay when you actually buy him. And late game, ancients start costing tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of hero souls. Buying Morg early doesn’t change the fact that he increases the purchase price of your other ancients.

Now, yes…eventually that 1% per hero soul bonus will overcome the cost he adds. But the point that happens at depends on how many ancients you want to buy…ever. Maybe you don’t want every ancient. But even if you only want 20 of them, you’d need to invest twenty five thousand hero souls into Morg just to break even on his cost. if you do want every ancient, it’s millions.

You’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. Siyalatas and hero souls increase dps multiplicatively, not additively.

Think of it this way: imagine you have two boxes, and ten points to divide up between them. You can put any number of the ten points into each box. And once you’re done putting them in which box you want, I’m going to multiply the two numbers together.

What’s the best way to put numbers in boxes?

Its immediately obvious that the best arrangement is to put 5 in each box. If you put zero in one box and ten in the other, when you multiply them you get zero. If you put 1 in one box and 9 in the other, you get 9. If you put 2 and 8, you get 16. 3 and 7 you get 21. 4 and 6 you get 24. And 5 and 5 gives you 25.

This is just like Siyalatas and hero souls. You spend hero souls to increase Siyalata’s level, as you do, even though it means you have fewer hero souls, the number you get when you multiply gets bigger.

But, what happens if you keep spending past that ideal point?

Well, what happens if once you have 5 points in each box, you keep moving more over? Instead of 5 and 5, if you have 6 and 4, you get 24. If you have 7 and 3, you get 21. You see how the numbers are going down? It’s a simple multiplication. That’s basically all that’s going on with Siya and hero souls, except that it takes more than “one point” worth of hero souls to increase Siya’s level. But the basic idea remains the same.

For example, imagine you had 100 points to work with, and two boxes. To begin with, 99 points are in the first box and 1 is in the second box. You can move from one box to the other as you like, but with a twist: every time you move a point over, it “costs” one more point to make the move, and those extra points are simply lost. Even so, it’s still beneficial to move some over. 99 and 1 multiplied gives 99. To move one over costs point, so move one and lose one gives you 97 times 2, which is 194. Even though you lost a point, the number you get when you multiply is still bigger. Move another one, and this time you lose two, so you get 94 times 3, which is 282, which is again bigger, even though you “lost” 2 points this time.

That’s basically all that’s going on with Siya and hero souls. The goal is simply to find that ideal point of moving hero souls over at which when you mutiply you get the highest possible result.

Level these two a bit, and you’ll punch through your wall pretty easily. Most of my other ancients are ~100 levels lower than yours, but with frags/bhaal in the 50s-70 range when I activate abilities I can routinely beat not one, but two bosses in the 1300s before the 30 seconds are up.

Though note that “day 1” ascension was like 34 hours or something, since I started early one day and ascended late the next.

Don’t think I’ll continue, but even without the 30 hero soul bonus and hero souls no longer giving cooldown or gold bonuses, the game seems noticeably easier to me that it was when I first started back in version .06, I think. Siyalatas adds a lot of damage, and gilded bonuses are noticeable. Though knowledge of the game helps too. I’m not wasting energize on dark ritual anymore, I’m using it to beat bosses then ascend. Primals make a surprisingly big difference too. On my very first ascension after the hard reset I had more hero souls after one day than I did originally on first ascension after 2-3 days, and even after playing for weeks I was typically getting 7 hero souls per ascension, but now after the hard reset I got 15 on my last ascension after only playing a few days. There’s no way I could have done that in older versions.

In the early game on some acts where minerals are in terribly short supply , I find Aid useful, as over time it adds up to be worth a couple buildings. Rush, I mostly save for constructions in progress about to be attacked. Zap the monster, rush the building so it doesn’t get canceled. And on some acts it’s also useful to capture specific tiles that like to avoid capture.

Really though, past the early part of a game, most of the time I simply have too many things going on to use them very much. The amount of time rush speeds something up usually isn’t very significant when there are routinely half a dozen different things being built or attacked any any given moment. I don’t build one thing the sit there and watch it.

2. Do you like using Rush?
3. Do you like using Aid?

“Like” is probably a strong word for my feelings about them. They’re functional and valid tools. They’re not hugely powerful, and maybe a bit micromanage-y, but it’s nice to have the option. I don’t sit around staring at the cooldowns eagerly looking forward to them being available.

It is a stupidly massive resource hog. On a computer that can play games like Eve Online, and multiple simultaneous instances of WoW…even static menus on unity idle games, sitting there doing nothing routinely eats up 50% of my cpu.

If your’e developing for mobile, unity might be a good option. But it’s awful for browser games. It’s like booking a flight on a space shuttle to get to your next door neighbor’s house. Nobody in their right mind would do that when they can simply walk. Meanwhile, if you’re a developer:

Unity has low market penetration

It is more expensive for the full development environment than adobe flash

A lot users don’t like it

Why in the world would you choose to pay more for a development environment that is slow, laggy, buggy, crashes a lot, requires a third party plugin to use, solely for the sake of reaching a smaller, frustrated market of users who don’t want to deal with all these problems?

Why?

Just…why?

I hope unity fails, and a lot of other frustrated users feel the same way. Unity is a ploy to introduce a new proprietary format with the hope that it becomes standard, so that the company that produces it can monopolize market share. Which, yes…is exactly the same thing that abode did with flash, and adobe annoyed a lot people when it was new too. As a programmer, I remember very clearly when I first downloaded the “Free” flash development environment back in the 90s and was absolutely disgusted with how awful it was. And now, years later there’s no longer a free version, it’s a monthly fee based service to make adbobe rich. Unity is doign exactly the same thing, and all the devs who learn it are foolishly buying into the same scam: all those free versions will be made obsolete and no longer work the moment they think they can get away with an exclusively fee based service.

Please also take off of stupid Unity. Completely unnecessary waste of my computer’s resources.

That deserves its own topic, but yeah…unity is an awful, slow, buggy resource hog. It’s also more expensive than flash for the full development environment and has lower market penetration. I don’t understand why any developer would pay more to reach fewer players solely for the sake of annoying them that even trivial idle games like this use up 50% cpu resources because it’s such a horribly designed environment.

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